Angels Flight (1998)

by Michael Connelly

  “Do you remember the name of the cop you told this to?”

  “I think his name was Edgar but I don’t know if that was his first or last name.”

  “What about the person who took your call in the first place? Did he give a name?”

  “I think he said his name but I forget it. But he did say he was an agent. So maybe it was an FBI guy.”

  “Steve, think for a minute. What time did you make this call and when did Edgar call you back? Do you remember?”

  Vascik was quiet while he thought about it.

  “Well, I didn’t get up till about ten ’cause my legs were killing me from the climb. I then kind of lazed around and read the paper. It was all over the front page, so I probably read it right after the sports. And then I called. So maybe about eleven. Thereabouts. And then that Edgar guy called back pretty quick.”

  “Thanks, Steve.”

  Bosch clicked the phone off. He knew there was no way Edgar had taken a call at Parker Center on Sunday morning at eleven. Edgar had been with Bosch all Sunday morning and most of the rest of the day. And they were on the road, not working out of Parker. Someone had used his partner’s name. A cop. Someone inside the investigation had used Edgar’s name.

  He looked up Lindell’s cell phone number and called. Lindell still had it turned on and he answered.

  “It’s Bosch. You remember Sunday morning, after you and your people came into the case, you spent most of the morning in the conference room with the files, right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Who was answering the phones?”

  “Me mostly. A couple of the others.”

  “Did you take a call from a guy said he was a process server?”

  “Sounds familiar. But we were getting lots of calls that morning. Reporters and people thinking they knew something. People threatening the cops.”

  “A process server named Vascik. Steve Vascik. He said he had some information that might be important.”

  “Like I said, it’s familiar. What about it, Bosch? I thought this case was over.”

  “It is. I’m just checking some loose ends. Who’d you give the call to?”

  “I gave those kind of calls — you know, info off the street — to the IAD guys. To keep them busy.”

  “Which one did you give the process server to?”

  “I don’t know, probably Chastain. He was in charge of that group. He might’ve taken it or told one of the others to call the guy back. See, Irving set up some shitty phones in there. We couldn’t transfer one to the other and I wanted the main line free. So we took numbers and passed them on.”

  “Okay, thanks, man. Have a nice night.”

  “Hey, what is — ”

  Bosch disconnected before he had to answer any questions. He thought about the information from Lindell. He believed there was a high probability that the call from Vascik had been routed to Chastain himself, who then called back — probably taking the message to his own office for privacy — and posed as Edgar.

  Bosch had one more call to make. He opened his phone book and found a number that he had not used in many years. He called Captain John Garwood, head of Robbery-Homicide Division, at home. He knew it was late but he doubted very many people were sleeping in Los Angeles tonight. He thought about what Kiz Rider had said about Garwood reminding her of Boris Karloff and only coming out at night.

  Garwood answered after two rings.

  “It’s Harry Bosch. We need to talk. Tonight.”

  “About?”

  “John Chastain and the Black Warrior case.”

  “I don’t want to talk on the phone.”

  “Fine. Name the place.”

  “Frank Sinatra?”

  “How soon?”

  “Give me half an hour.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  36

  IN the long run, Frank Sinatra got ripped off. Decades ago, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce put his star down on the sidewalk, they put it on Vine Street

  rather than on Hollywood Boulevard

  . The thinking probably was that the Sinatra star would be a draw, people would come down from the boulevard to see it, to take a picture. But if that was the plan, it didn’t work. Frank was alone in a spot that probably saw more hypes than tourists. His star was at a crosswalk between two parking lots and next to a residence hotel where you had to convince the security guard to unlock the lobby door if you wanted to go in.

  When Bosch had been in RHD years before, the Sinatra star had often been a meeting spot between detectives in the field or between detectives and their snitches. It hadn’t surprised Bosch that Garwood had suggested it for their meeting. It was a way of meeting on neutral ground.

  By the time Bosch got to the star Garwood was already there. Bosch saw his unmarked Ford LTD in the parking lot.

  Garwood flashed his lights. Bosch pulled to the curb in front of the hotel and got out. He crossed Vine to the parking lot and got in the front passenger seat. Garwood was wearing a suit, even though called from home. Bosch realized that he had never seen Garwood in anything other than a suit, the tie always pulled tight, the top button of his shirt never undone. Again Bosch thought of Rider’s Boris Karloff comment.

  “Those fucking cars,” Garwood said, looking across the street at Bosch’s slickback. “I heard about you getting potshotted.”

  “Yeah. That wasn’t fun.”

  “So what brings you out tonight, Harry? How come you’re still investigating a case that the chief of police and everybody else has already closed?”

  “Because I have a bad feeling about it, Cap. There are loose ends. Things can unravel when you have loose ends.”

  “You never could leave things alone. I remember that from when you worked for me. You and your fucking loose ends.”

  “So tell me about Chastain.”

  Garwood said nothing, just stared ahead through the windshield, and Bosch realized that his former captain was unsure about things.

  “We’re off the record here, Captain. Like you said, the case is closed. But something about Chastain and Frankie Sheehan bothers me. You should know, a couple nights ago Frankie told me everything. About how he and some of the guys lost it, did things to Michael Harris. He told me all the Black Warrior stuff was true. And then I made a mistake. I told him that I had cleared Harris. That I could prove he didn’t take that girl. And that put the hex on Frankie and later on he did what he did. So when they came up with the ballistics today and said that Frankie did it all, including Angels Flight, I went along to get along. Now I’m not so sure. Now I want all the loose ends tied up and Chastain is one of them. He was subpoenaed for the trial. Nothing unusual about that — he handled the internal investigation of Harris’s complaint. But he was subpoenaed by Elias and he didn’t tell us. He also tried to duck the service. And that makes it all the more unusual. That tells me he didn’t want to be in that courtroom. He didn’t want to be on the stand and have Elias asking him questions. I want to know why. There’s nothing in Elias’s files — at least the files I have access to — that says why. I can’t ask Elias and I don’t want to ask Chastain yet. So I’m asking you.”

  Garwood reached into his pocket and took out a package of cigarettes. He got one out and lit it, then offered the pack to Bosch.

  “No thanks, I’m still off.”

  “I decided that I’m a smoker and that’s that. Somebody a long time ago told me that it was like destiny or fate. You were a smoker or you weren’t, there was nothing you could do about it. You know who that was?”

  “Yeah, me.”

  Garwood snorted a little and smiled. He took a couple of deep drags and the car filled with smoke. It kicked off the familiar craving in Bosch. He remembered giving Garwood the smoking sermon years before when someone in the squad complained about the cloud of smoke that always hung over the bullpen. He lowered his window a couple of inches.

  “Sorry,” Garwood said. “I know how you feel. Everybody smoking and
you can’t.”

  “It’s no problem. You want to talk about Chastain or not?”

  One more drag.

  “Chastain investigated the complaint. You know that. Before Harris could sue us he had to file a complaint. That went to Chastain. And from what I understood at the time, he made the guy’s case. He confirmed it. Fucking Rooker had a pencil in his desk — the tip was broken off and there was blood on it. Kept it like a souvenir or something. Chastain got it with a search warrant and was going to match the blood to Harris.”

  Bosch shook his head, at both the stupidity and the arrogance of Rooker. Of the whole department.

  “Yeah,” Garwood said, seeming to know what he was thinking. “So the last thing I heard was that Chastain was going to file departmentals against Sheehan, Rooker, couple of the others, then go to the D.A. for criminal charges. He was going all the way with this one because that pencil and the blood were hard evidence. He had Rooker at least in the bag.”

  “Okay, so what happened.”

  “What happened was that the next thing is we get the word that everybody’s clear. Chastain filed the case as unfounded.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Somebody reached down.”

  “You got it.”

  “Who?”

  “Irving’s my guess. But maybe higher. The case was too volatile. If the charges were sustained and there were suspensions, firings, D.A. charges, whatever, then we start a whole new round of ‘kick the LAPD’ in the press and in the south end with Tuggins and Sparks and everywhere else. Remember, this was a year ago. The new chief had just come on board. It wouldn’t be a good way to start out. So somebody reached down. Irving’s always been the department fixer. It was probably him. But for something like this, he might have enlisted the chief’s okay. That’s how Irving survives. He hooks the chief in, then he can’t be touched because he has the secrets. Like J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI — but without the dress. I think.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “What do you think happened to that pencil with the blood on it?” he asked.

  “Who knows? Irving’s probably using it to write personnel evaluations. Though I’m sure he’s washed the blood off it.”

  They were silent for a moment as they watched a group of a dozen young men walking north on Vine toward the boulevard. They were mostly white. In the streetlight Bosch could see the tattoos covering their arms. Head-bangers, probably going up to the stores on the boulevard to replay 1992. A quick memory of Frederick’s of Hollywood being looted flashed through his mind.

  The group slowed as they passed Bosch’s car. They considered whether to do something to the car and then decided against it and moved on.

  “Lucky we didn’t meet in your car,” Garwood said.

  Bosch didn’t say anything.

  “This place is going to come apart tonight,” Garwood continued. “I can feel it. Pity the rain stopped.”

  “Chastain,” Bosch said, getting back on track. “Somebody put a cork in him. Complaint unfounded. Then Elias files his suit and eventually subpoenas Chastain. Chastain doesn’t want to testify, why?”

  “Maybe he takes the oath seriously. He didn’t want to lie.”

  “There’s got to be more than that.”

  “Ask him.”

  “Elias had a source inside Parker. A leak. I think it was Chastain. I don’t mean just on this case. I mean a longtime leak — adirect conduit inside to records, everything. I think it was Chastain.”

  “It’s funny. A cop who hates cops.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if he was Elias’s big important conduit, why would Elias put him on the stand and expose him like that?”

  That was the question and Bosch had no answer. He was silent for a while, thinking about this. He finally put together the thin beginnings of a theory and said it out loud.

  “Elias wouldn’t have known Chastain had been corked unless Chastain had told him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So just by putting Chastain on the stand and asking him about it would be revealing Chastain as his source.”

  Garwood nodded.

  “I can see that,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Even if Chastain sat up there and denied every question, Elias could ask the questions in a way that they would still get the point — and in this case, the truth — across to the jury.”

  “It would also make the point at Parker Center,” Garwood said. “Chastain would be exposed. Question is, why would Elias expose his source? Somebody who had been helping him a hell of a lot over the years. Why would he give that up?”

  “Because this was Elias’s home run case. The big one that would put him on the national map. It would put him on Court TV, Sixty Minutes, Larry King and everything else. It would make him. He would be willing to burn his source for that. Any lawyer would.”

  “I see that, too. Yeah.”

  The next part was left unsaid. That being the question of what Chastain would do to prevent being publicly burned on the stand. To Bosch the answer was obvious. If he were exposed not only as Elias’s source but as the investigator who compromised the internal investigation of Michael Harris’s complaint, he would be vilified both inside and outside the department. There would be nowhere for him to go and that would be untenable for a man like Chastain, for any man. Bosch believed Chastain would be willing to kill to prevent that from happening.

  “Thanks, Captain,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

  “It doesn’t matter, you know.”

  Bosch looked over at him.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The press releases have been made, the press conferences given, the story’s out and the city is ready to go like kindling. You think the people in the south end care which cop killed Elias? They don’t give a shit. They already have what they want. Chastain, Sheehan, doesn’t matter. What matters is that a badge did it. And if you go making noise you’ll just be adding more fuel to the fire. You bring up Chastain and you bring up the cover-up. A lot of people might get hurt, lose their jobs, all because they wanted to head this off in the first place. You better think about that, Harry. Nobody cares.”

  Bosch nodded. He understood the message. Go along to get along.

  “I care,” he said.

  “Is that enough of a reason?”

  “What about Chastain then?”

  Garwood had a thin smile on his face. Bosch could see it behind the glowing point of his cigarette.

  “I think Chastain deserves whatever he gets. And someday he’ll get it.”

  Now there was a new message and Bosch thought he understood that as well.

  “And what about Frankie Sheehan? What about his reputation?”

  “There’s that,” Garwood said, nodding. “Frankie Sheehan was one of my guys . . . but he’s dead and his family doesn’t live here anymore.”

  Bosch said nothing but that answer wasn’t acceptable. Sheehan was his friend and partner. Tainting him tainted Bosch himself.

  “You know what bothers me?” Garwood asked. “And maybe you might be able to help me, being that you and Sheehan were partners at one time.”

  “What? What bothers you?”

  “The gun Sheehan used. It wasn’t yours now, was it? I know they asked you that.”

  “No, not mine. We had gone by his house on the way to mine. To get clothes and things. He must’ve picked it up then. The FBI must’ve missed it when they searched his place.”

  Garwood nodded.

  “I heard you made notification to his wife. Did you ask her about that? You know, about the gun.”

  “I asked. She said she didn’t know about any gun but that doesn’t — ”

  “No serial number,” Garwood said, cutting in. “A throw-down gun, everybody knows that’s what that was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s what bothers me. I knew Sheehan a lot of years. He worked for me a long time and you get to know your guys. I never knew him to be the
kind of guy who would have a throw-down . . . I asked some of the other guys — especially the ones that partnered with him since you went to Hollywood. They never knew about a throw-down. What about you, Harry? You worked with him the longest. Did he ever carry an extra piece?”

  It hit Bosch then, like a punch in the chest. The kind where you have to keep perfectly still and silent and wait it out until you slowly get your breath back. He had never known Frank Sheehan to carry a throw-down on the job. He was too good for that. And if you were too good to carry one on the job, why have one hidden at home? That question and its obvious answer had been there right in front of him all along. But he had missed it.